EBT theft has deeply damaged the lives of the lowest-income Americans. The following insights reveal a system that leaves people in the dark and fails to protect a crucial lifeline.
COVID-19 has highlighted the central role that technology plays in delivering essential services such as food, housing assistance, and unemployment insurance. How that technology is designed can make the difference between receiving or being denied the public benefits people are eligible for. The social safety net has been remade on the fly in response to COVID-19, but temporary patches to our systems aren’t sustainable. A growing field of tech-enabled safety net organizations have begun building tools that apply modern digital technology to the safety net. Getting people the services they’re eligible for requires the government to create policy and build technology that are inclusive, portable, interoperable, and people-centric. Read our new field scan, “Building the Tech-Enabled Safety Net” to understand a dozen fintech and civic tech organizations working across fourteen safety net programs and showing what’s possible when modern technology is married to a consumer insights perspective.
The Aspen Financial Security Program identified five reoccurring trends of social media platform usage by people in relation to safety net programs and four techniques for capturing people’s experiences in order to reform the safety net. This report describes how the government can use widespread social media feedback and begin to build long-term measures to center people’s experience as an important component of policy design
